Casinos have long found it beneficial to closely monitor the financial performance of gaming machines. During the past two decades, casinos have turned to electronic monitoring, in which a communications connection is established between each gaming machine and a central storage location or server. Game performance data is collected at regular intervals, for example, every hour, every shift, or every day, from each game and stored on the central server in an organized way. Later, another computer process examines and consolidates those records into reports. Information recorded may include, wagers made, wagers paid, games played, and even denomination of currency used to play the games.
Often times, the above described accounting system is extended to connect to various entry points of each game. For example, the entry door to a slot machine is connected to a sensor so that any door opening is immediately made known to security personnel to alert them of a potentially unauthorized entry. Other monitored entry points include the currency acceptor door and the coin collection door. This information may be used for instant security purposes and/or stored in an organized way at a central storage location or server.
In most casinos, players are issued identification cards, which may be inserted into any gaming machine during play activities. These identifiers allow the casino to measure the amount of a player's wagers and evaluate their worth. As an incentive to use the identifier card, and to establish loyalty with the casino, valuable players are offered points, free meals, comps, show tickets, cash rebates, and other rewards. Information concerning the player ID and play associated with the player is often recorded on the same server as the above-described accounting information. Alternately, it is recorded on a separate computer server but is still organized in such a way that consolidated reports may be created through analysis of the stored information.
The just-described processes provide useful security alerts and valuable information on how much players spend at each gaming machine. To implement them, each gaming machine is programmed to record the values of interest and transmit them to the central server though a specifically defined language or protocol. Both the sender of the information, the gaming machine in this case, and the receiver of information, in this case the central server, must be capable of understanding the protocol and of formatting transmitted information using the protocol.
These processes and protocols provide accurate accounting records for overall game performance. However, these processes do not help in understanding player behavior. For example, when a player decides to leave a gaming machine, do they do so when they run out of credits on the machine, hit a significant jackpot, or go for a long period of time without hitting a significant jackpot? Do players typically wager maximum credits for long periods and drop to lesser wagers when credits run low, or do they typically change wager sizes throughout a gambling session?
What is needed to answer these questions and others is a way to determine player behavior on a gaming machine. Traditionally, player behavior is estimated through analysis of the above-described data and through direct observation of players as they play the gaming machines. The currently collected information simply does not provide the detailed insights necessary to truly understand behavior and direct observation of players is difficult. This is because players do not like to be watched. Also, it is expensive to station a person to watch each player and even when that is done, it is difficult for the observer to note and record each action taken by the player. Thus, a means for automatically recording detailed player behavior and a process for analyzing that behavior in a rapid and cost-effective way are needed.